Unleashing the creative force
Adrianne Krstansky
Assistant Professor of Theater ArtsM.F.A., University of California at San Diego
Beyond playing diverse characters on stage, Adrianne Krstansky has won applause as teacher, director and mentor to aspiring Brandeis thespians. Bitten by the theater bug while in her teens, she told a reporter for the 'Justice,' “We read 'Macbeth' in my high-school English class, and I was stunned by how emotional and imperfect and passionate everyone in the play was … so I quit cheerleading to go work on plays.”
Today, she schools aspiring actors in skills that include improvisation and ensemble building. In her Collaborative Process course, she said, “students seem to completely erupt and come into contact with not just powerful feelings, but also a creative force that seems to take on a life of its own.”
Celebrated as a director both at Brandeis and in regional theater, Krstansky has worked as an actress at the American Repertory Theater, New York’s Public Theater, Shakespeare and Company, Steppenwolf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater and SpeakEasy Stage Company, among other venues. Recently she appeared in "The Company Men," written and directed by John Wells ("The West Wing") and starring Ben Affleck and Chris Cooper.
For the love of music
David Rakowski
Walter W. Naumburg Professor of CompositionPh.D., Princeton University
Twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in music, David Rakowski has amassed a pile of additional awards, including NEA, Guggenheim and MacDowell Colony fellowships. He has heard his musical compositions played all over the world.
Reviewers of his 160-plus works for clarinets, percussion, strings, brass and piano have used words like visceral, humorous, exuberant, inventive, lyrical, luminous, boisterous and quirky. But Rakowski’s global eminence is matched by his popularity in the classroom, and students employ many of the same adjectives to describe his teaching, Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe commented in spring 2009 as he presented Rakowski with the university’s Neubauer Prize for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring.
One of the nominating students wrote, “Professor Rakowski’s classes are the highlight of my week. It is clear that his students always come first, and that he is a teacher because he really wants us to understand and love music as much as he does.”
Demystifying the Art of Asia
Aida Yuen Wong
Associate Professor of Fine ArtsPh.D., Columbia University
Born in Hong Kong, Aida Wong earned two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. from Columbia before joining the faculty at Brandeis, where art history students delight in what they term her “contagious enthusiasm” for Asian art.“My favorite classroom moments,” she says, “are when students go from mute admiration of art to eloquent talk about it—when they look at a striking piece of Ming Dynasty porcelain, for example, and are able to analyze the aesthetic relationship between glaze and form.”
Most interested in modern and contemporary Asia, transculturalism and national identity, Wong recently published her first book, "Parting the Mists." Focusing on Japanese influence in modern Chinese art, it was welcomed by one reader as “a valuable contribution to the study of trans-Asiatic modernism” and as “an indispensable reference for Sino-Japanese relations in art history.”
Other recent projects, Wong says, find her “looking at representations of Asian cities through the full range of visual media — not only painting and photography, but also film, architecture and commercial art, such as advertisements.”